Amerika Read Free Page A

for our extended flight plan to Key West. I wasn’t about to lose it by violating their precious airspace. I patted the polished oak control yoke. How many times in the past had my sweaty hands gripped this very wheel under very different circumstances?
    This particular S-38, NC-6000, had a previous life before becoming a hangar queen for the Providence charter outfit, where I had bought her and changed her call sign to ‘Carter Air 45.’  She had once been the star performer of Pan American’s fledgling airline service from Miami to Havana in the early 1930s. In her heyday, she had flown fun-seeking passengers, pockets full of gambling money, from Pan Am’s Key West seaplane base down to swinging and swaying Havana for a fun-and-sex-filled weekend.
    I know, because I was flying in the right hand seat and Captain Fatt, my mentor, the left.
    Together we’d skim across the smooth waters, lift off and begun that familiar, slow, lazy climb to twenty-five hundred feet where we would weave in and out of the puffy cumulous clouds and make our way south across the Florida Straits. Weather permitting we could cover the ninety miles separating our two nations in less than an hour and deliver our passengers safe and sound to the Havana’s Prohibition-free, bar-filled streets.
    I glanced over at the empty co-pilot’s seat and remembered a younger, happier Sam Carter sitting in that very same spot ten years earlier, hands in his lap, patiently waiting for Fatt to swing the wheel over to his side and say in his gravelly voice, ‘You have the aircraft, kid.’
    ‘I have the aircraft, sir.’
    ‘Maintain your heading, I’m going back to mingle.’
    And with that, he would heave up his bulk from the left-seat and ease back into the passenger compartment. Already snug quarters with seating for twelve, Fatt’s presence made it burst at the seams. But happily so.
    As I flew along, I would do my best to eavesdrop on his smooth banter, trying to learn his secret of mixing drinks for the passengers using the small bar built into the back of the bulkhead that separated the cockpit from the paying customers. The plane’s original plans had called for isolating these two areas. But Juan Trippe understood the value of a captain mingling with his customers and modified it. Captain Fatt’s dominating physical presence not only reassured them to the safety of aviation, it also guaranteed future flights would be booked on our small airline, not some rival.
    Pan Am was tiny back in 1929 when I first started working there. Trippe had opened service out of Key West using under-powered Fokker Tri-planes, lots of prayer, and miles of baling wire. I joined them a few months later as an eager nineteen year-old radio operator, after lying that I knew all about it. But after studying my head off the night before my final interview, I managed to bluff my way through the tests the next day, and kept at it until I actually did learn Morse code and communicated with the Pan Am planes flying back and forth across the Straits carrying passengers and mail.
    But I didn’t want to pound a Morse Key the rest of my life. I wanted to fly. I already had my license. Against my father and mother’s wishes, I had run away from Key West at seventeen to help build runways for the airmail routes. Along the way I got flying lessons here and there from airmail pilots who took my hard-earned money, stuffed me in the front seat of a beat-up Jenny J-4 biplane and showed me the difference between a slip and a crab, a bank and a turn until I finally got the idea and soloed.
    Don’t get me wrong. Saying you’ve soloed an airplane is like saying ‘I took my first step.’ There’s a lot more to walking than that. And don’t forget running, leaping, jumping and twisting. Flying’s the same way; everything’s new and different and scary, then you do it over and over again until it becomes second nature, and then disappears completely and your hands and feet and head and